IP/optical integration typically results in cost savings, but maintaining service availability is also essential when measuring total return on investment (ROI). An analysis of 3 modes of operation found multi-layer protection and restoration to be the most cost efficient while meeting availability requirements.

Public safety professionals require the highest level of reliable, multimedia mobile communications to enhance their operational effectiveness. And while standard based long term evolution (LTE) provides the most cost-effective and secure way to support these broadband communications, transitioning to this new technology will demand a complex technical, operational, and business evolution for the public safety community.

Why LTE – and why now?

Public safety communications are at a turning point. The most urgent events – planned and unplanned – require more than mission-critical voice to improve first responders’ efficiency. Real-time imagery, video, geo-localization, and high-speed access to private cloud-based information and applications are becoming essential to fulfill first responders’ missions.

Existing private mobile radio (PMR) systems have limited capabilities to deliver this, because they were designed to primarily support narrowband mission-critical voice.

For LTE, it’s a different story. LTE can complement existing PMR networks to dramatically enhance operational effectiveness and coordination within a secure infrastructure shared by cooperating agencies.

OpenStack isn’t an as-is solution for telco network functions virtualization (NFV) infrastructures. OpenStack is an open-source cloud management technology that provides many of the capabilities needed in any NFV environment. And this has prompted interest among many telco service providers.

But to realize the full benefits of NFV, service providers need NFV platforms that provide additional capabilities to support distributed clouds, enhanced network control, lifecycle management, and high performance data planes.

Contact centers are better than most service businesses when it comes to that. Retail is notoriously terrible when it comes to spur-of-the-moment shift and hours changing; employees are often sent home if sales are slack. On the other hand there is little freedom and freedom to move careerwise in contact centers and the work itself commands little respect. Therefore to retain quality people extra care must be given to permit them to have meaningful lives.

I like cellphones as phones and tablets as e-mail/texting/surfing means. I dislike the reverse: for me and many others cellphones are a terrible tool for communications other than voice. The keyboards may be suited for Tweets and texts but are just too tiny for serious e-mail/chat work for all as are the screens.
And tablets as of yet, and for some unexplainable reason do not have cellphone i.e. voice call functionality built in.
Now could it be that the device manufacturers may finally get it right by combining the two?

Now there is another reason--and rightfully so--why contact centers should consign credit cards to the dustbin: lawsuits. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) filed suit late last year against Kaplan Higher Education Corporation for allegedly engaging "in a pattern or practice of unlawful discrimination by refusing to hire a class of black job applicants nationwide."

The social channel appears on first glance to provide a readily-extracted motherlode of information and insights that can help firms retain and build relations with customers and attract new ones. For in the huge volume of conversations: blogs, comments on sites e.g. TripAdvisor et al, Facebook postings and Tweets are concerns, complaints, experiences and ideas about companies' products and services that are waiting to be mined, assayed, processed, refined and used.

For if air travel weren't a nightmare already what with painfully cramped seating, made worse by salt-laden food at airport concessionaires (airline food was for the most part remarkably healthy with sensibly controlled portions), long delays, frequent cancellations, high fares and other examples of lousy service...and if going through security wasn't a hassle and humiliating enough...now there are the intimate "pat downs" that the overworked and customer-abused American and Canadian personnel have to inflict on fliers when the computers tell them to.
This procedure may well be the last straw for travelers and organizations that are already fed up with travel.

the laws regulating calling hours, whom to call and what devices to be reach are strict and are enforced. The lumps of coal in one's stocking for being bad is nothing compared to those received from publicity-seeking elected officials: which are in comparison mere taps to those that can be wielded from annoyed customers via comments delivered through Tweets and posts.

Bright, helpful, results-oriented motivated individuals generate superior performance both in higher profits and lower costs. Yet how come so few firms do this? Why do despite new methods, technologies and best practices in e-screening and interviewing, e-learning and in-person training, voice and screen recording and quality monitoring and speech and desktop analytics and in supervisor management so many get it wrong: resulting in poor service, substandard sales and high and costly turnover?
The answer lies in "HR": not just human resources departments but in the corporate "cost-center" mentality that staff are merely material: biomass to be sourced, transported (by themselves), sifted, processed, used and when finished, discarded.

This is the season where individuals--and organizations such as contact centers--make their wish lists. Yet with budgets both household and corporate limited there is no allowance--or tolerance--for unused or misused items; the penalties include reprimands and threats to cut back on how much is given next year.
Therefore it is essential that the items that go on the lists reflect critical and provable needs for which there are no on-hand or lower-cost substitutes. There must also be evidence that indicate these investments will be used and benefits quickly realized. The payoff is that in the well-run outfits, the centers that do just stand a greater chance of having more of their wishes granted.

The new GOP-controlled House should take a second look at their promises to roll back the healthcare reforms initiated and pushed by U.S. President Barack Obama and passed by the last Congress. Why? Because such moves may end up hurting individuals, businesses (like contact centers) and the economy--contrary to these elected officials' claims that dismantling "Obamacare" will "help".